But this year, a diverse group of 13 artists created a collection of official posters for the Rio games, meant to showcase the multitudinous array of people who call South America's largest country home. Asked to concoct images that represented Rio de Janiero, 12 Brazilian artists and 1 Colombian artist designed posters full of bright colors and emblems of the city. One depicts a child flying a geometric kite over one of the city's favelas, and another shows a muscular athlete running the Olympic torch across a Copacabana beach. Some take the Olympic rings or the ocean as their central motif, while others are more abstract.

"It's really hard for us in Brazil to choose one artist to represent the Olympic Games, or represent the official posters," Carla Camurati, director of culture for the Rio Olympics, told the Associated Press when the posters were unveiled in Rio last month. "The important thing for us and the Olympic Games is to show Brazil as it is, with the colors, with the brightness, with the beauty of the mixture of people that we have here; the mixture of roots that we have."

The posters were previously on view at the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava's science museum, the Museum of Tomorrow, and they're now located at the Deodoro Olympic Park, where the collection will remain until the end of the games. After that, the posters will be permanently housed in local schools.